David Fincher’s Zodiac is for amateur sleuths at once an inspiration and a cautionary tale. Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhal), the movie’s main character and the author of the book on which the film was based, turns his life inside out and doesn’t even succeed in solving the Northern California Zodiac murders of the late 1960s. Alas, neither detective Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) nor reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey, Jr.) do either. The investigators, the film suggests, were also victimized by the Zodiac killer. Damaged marriages, careers, insomnia, and substance abuse mar their lives. In a figurative sense, they lose their lives to Zodiac too.

Having developed a fascination about the Zodiac murders, though not, I assure you, as consuming as monomaniac Graysmith’s, I was pleased to see the film’s fidelity to the case. Though its conclusion implies a killer, the rest of the movie, including Fincher’s casting of multiple actors as the Zodiac killer, suggests possibilities. Zodiac the film doesn’t allow itself a neat, Hollywood ending because Zodiac the case doesn’t allow for a neat, Hollywood ending. The film deviates little from Graysmith’s book of the same title. It stays true even down to arresting images of a dirty sex toy that, unfortunately, remained etched in my mind after reading the book. If the film differs from the book in any way, the former plays as more of a detective thriller while the latter, though certainly not in the horror genre, is a scare-the-body-thetans out of you page-turner.

At two-and-a-half hours, the film is too long. Fincher’s direction is, as always, superb. Though it repeatedly reminds viewers of place and time, the film's cars, hairstyles, phones, fashions make this, at least with regard to dates, redundant. The cast is a murderers’ row of thesbians: Chloe Sevigny, Robert Downey, Jr., Jake Gyllenhal, Adam Goldberg, Brian Cox, Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Edwards. The soundtrack is minimal, but I will never listen to Donovan's Hurdy Gurdy Man the same way again.

What the film has going for it more than anything is an arresting story that is more interesting than fiction. A murderer taunting the police with encrypted messages, attacking victims with a medieval executioner’s mask, suggesting a bizarre cartographic pattern to his murders, and terrorizing the Bay Area with threats of murdering children in school buses all makes for a tale that is hard to make boring.

A far more sinister criminal than the Zodiac, yet more subtle and stealth, works for Northwest Airlines. He is a criminal "master mind" or at least, master something. Read Drudge to unload the makings of a master criminal.

huh?

Personally, I thought Zodiac is the first best movie of 2007.